When She Would Govern Herself, She First Made
Her Elective Chief Magistrate Doge For Life, And Then For Two Years;
Under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802,
when, after having accepted the French notion
Of freedom from Bonaparte,
she enjoyed a lion's share of his vicissitudes. For a hundred years
before that the warring powers had fought over her in their various
quarrels about successions, and she ought to have been well inured to
suffering when, in 1800, the English and the Austrians besieged her
French garrison, and twenty thousand of her people starved in a cause
not their own. The English restored the Doges, and the Republic of Genoa
fell at last nineteen years after the Republic of Venice and three
hundred years after the Republic of Florence. She was given to Piedmont
in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, and she has formed part of Italy ever
since the unification. I believe that now she is of rather radical
opinions in politics, though the bookseller who found on his shelves a
last copy of the interesting sketch of Genoese history which I have
profited by so little, said that the Genoese had been disappointed in
the Socialists, lately in power, and were now voting Clerical by a large
majority.
The fact may have been colored by the book-seller's feelings. If the
Clericals are in superior force, the clerics are not: nowhere in Italy
did I see so few priests. All other orders of people throng the narrow,
noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and wheels beats
to the topmost stories of the palaces towering overhead in their stony
grandiosity.
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